The Daily Omnivore

Behaviorism is the theory that all things organisms do should be seen as behavior. Behaviorism says that behavior can be studied scientifically, without knowing what the physiology of an event is, and without using theories such as that of the mind. According to behaviorism, all behavior can be observed. Behaviorists first argued that the study of behavior should be a natural science, such as chemistry or physics, without any reference to hypothetical inner states of organisms as causes for their behavior. From early psychology in the 19th century, the behaviorist school of thought ran concurrently and shared commonalities with the psychoanalytic and Gestalt movements in psychology into the 20th century; but also differed from the mental philosophy of the Gestalt psychologists in critical ways.

In the second half of the 20th century, behaviorism was largely eclipsed as a result of the cognitive revolution, which include the internal processes of the mind in its purview. While behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in practical therapeutic applications, such as in cognitive–behavioral therapy that has demonstrable utility in treating certain pathologies, such as simple phobias, PTSD, and addiction. People who influenced behaviorism include Ivan Pavlov, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Pavlov investigated classical conditioning, but did not agree with Behaviorism or Behaviorists. Thorndike and Watson rejected introspective methods and wanted to restrict psychology to experimental methods. Skinner’s research focused on Operant conditioning.

read more »

Tafoni (singular: tafone) are small cave-like features found in granular rock such as sandstone, with rounded entrances and smooth concave walls. They often occur in groups that can riddle a hillside, cliff, or other rock formation.

They also frequently occur in granitic rocks. Small versions of tafoni are sometimes called alveoli; like the former, they are hypothesized to be results of salt weathering.

Semantic satiation is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition causes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and the central neural activation to fire repeatedly, which is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition.

Several activities demonstrate the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages. In each case subjects would repeat a word or number for several seconds, then perform the cognitive task using that word. It was demonstrated that repeating a word prior to its use in a task made the task somewhat more difficult.